the faint hum

The sound of the machines that never goes away, the last thing I hear at night and the gentle breath that greets me when I wake up before anyone else. Like the sigh of the wind through ancient tree-bound mountains, with flashing leds and un-set clocks.

Brendan Peveril, freelance writer of fiction, non-fiction and comics.

rhamphotheca:

Newly discovered dinosaur implies greater prevalence of feathers

by PhysOrg staff

A new species of feathered dinosaur discovered in southern Germany is further changing the perception of how predatory dinosaurs looked. The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived about 150 million years ago, provides the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds. The fossil is described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today.

“This is a surprising find from the cradle of feathered dinosaur work, the very formation where the first   was collected over 150 years ago,” said Mark Norell, chair of the Division of at the  and an author on the new paper along with researchers from Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie and the Ludwig Maximilians University.

Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rex and birds.Sciurumimus—identified as a megalosaur, not a coelurosaur— is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics…

(read more: PhysOrg)         (images: H. Tischlinger/Jura Museum Eichstätt)

__________________________________

More information: “Exceptionally preserved juvenile megalosauroid theropod dinosaur with filamentous integument from the Late Jurassic of Germany,” by Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Christian Foth, Helmut Tischlinger, and Mark A. Norell, PNAS, 2012.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Provided by American Museum of Natural History

(via cephalopodqueen)

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